The job : Wang, 45, is the founder and chief executive of Vizio Inc., which has its headquarters in Irvine. The consumer electronics manufacturer is known for bargain pricing and puts more LCD HDTVs on the market in the U.S. than any other company, according to iSuppli research. Background: He was born in Taiwan, and his parents moved to the U.S. when he was 12 to give him a better education. Wang fell in love with U.S. television. "I learned English from television," he said.

William Wang likes being disruptive, and television shoppers are paying the price -- a lower price. In 2002, when plasma TVs were selling for $10,000, the Taiwanese-born entrepreneur set out to sell one for $2,999. He fulfilled his ambition a year later, shipping a 46-inch model with a $2,799 price tag, about half what other brands then charged. Now his Irvine-based company, Vizio Inc., is the No.

The future of television could be sitting in an Irvine laboratory. To illuminate images, these sets use light-emitting diodes behind the screen, resulting in TVs that can be far thinner, brighter and more eco-friendly than other flat-panel models. LED-backlit TVs -- an evolution of the standard LCD set -- have been on the market since 2004. But the sets in this lab have something that could catapult the technology into the mainstream. A far lower price.

Last year, Alex Groth and Kevin Jennison wanted to help charities and donate money to causes they cared about, but as busy and financially strapped college kids, they felt like they couldn't do anything that'd make much of an impact. So instead, they invented a way to donate money to charity just by surfing the Web. Groth and Jennison, both of whom now work for a start-up in Silicon Valley, created Tab for a Cause, an app for Chrome or Firefox Web browsers that will automatically donate fractions of a cent to charity each time someone opens a new tab. That may not seem like much, but those pennies can add up when you think of the number of tabs each person opens up each day. It works this way: The app replaces the blank pages that come up when you open new tabs to go to a website with special pages designed by the team at Tab for a Cause.

Samsung Electronics Co. of South Korea, the world's largest maker of liquid-crystal display televisions, may be barred from selling TVs and computer monitors in the U.S. after losing a patent case filed by Japanese rival Sharp Corp. The U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington said Wednesday that Samsung violated Sharp's patent rights and ordered both sides to submit arguments on whether an import ban should be imposed. In a notice on its website, the agency said it wanted to consider the effect of a ban on "competitive conditions in the U.S. economy."

Among the several records broken by ultra-skydiver Felix Baumgartner on Sunday, there was one that may have been unexpected: most viewers to a live event ever on YouTube . The highest skydive in history, during which Baumgartner became the first free-falling human to break the sound barrier, racked up 8 million simultaneous views on YouTube. The live stream of the event lasted more than two hours, showing the relatively slow accent by balloon to about 24 miles above Earth, then the jump that hit speeds as high as 834 mph and took a little more than 10 minutes.

Is OnLive still alive? The online-game streaming company may have laid off a significant number of workers, triggering wide speculation about whether it is on life support. The stories of layoffs, reported by Mashable , Kotaku , Engadget and Gamasutra , were dismissed in an email as "rumors" by OnLive spokeswoman Jane Anderson, who declined comment further. Mashable reported that "the entire staff" of OnLive was laid off Friday morning, while Engadget put the figure at 50% of employees.

M-Go, a Burbank-based online entertainment service founded by DreamWorks Animation and Technicolor, has signed licensing deals with five of the six major Hollywood studios, the company is expected to announce Wednesday. The deals with NBCUniversal, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Bros. help fill out the library of movie and television titles M-Go will offer when it launches in the fourth quarter. Unlike Netflix, M-Go doesn't plan to offer unlimited video for a flat monthly fee. Nor does it plan to offer free television reruns, unlike Hulu or the networks' sites.

The influential lobby group Consumer Electronics Assn. is fighting what appears to be a losing battle to dissuade California regulators from passing the nation's first ban on energy-hungry big-screen televisions. On Tuesday, executives and consultants for the Arlington, Va., trade group asked members of the California Energy Commission to instead let consumers use their wallets to decide whether they want to buy the most energy-saving new models of liquid-crystal display and plasma high-definition TVs. "Voluntary efforts are succeeding without regulations," said Doug Johnson, the association's senior director for technology policy.

It will cost more to visit many California parks starting Monday. Day-use parking fees will increase $2 to $5, depending on the park, and camping fees will rise by $10 to $21 a night, according to state parks Director Ruth Coleman. "In these dire economic times, we can no longer afford to keep our fees at their current levels," Coleman said. "The people of California understand that by charging more, we will be able to keep more parks open and preserved." A list of parks where fees will rise will be made available when the increases go into effect, Coleman said.